Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Monitoring is one of the operational tasks in a cloud-based environment for fault detection, correction, and system maintenance. For example, utilization of servers and storage capacity may be regularly monitored. Monitoring of data may be useful for short-term management as well as for long-term capacity planning. Machine images run from the service catalog may also need to be monitored. Systems administrators may need to know which applications are used frequently. Monitoring may also include security monitoring, such as monitoring user activity, suspicious events, authentication failures or repeated unauthorized access attempts, and scanning of inbound and outbound network traffic.
End-users may need to be able to monitor usage of cloud resources, and receive alerts when additional resources are needed. These monitoring capabilities may include tools for monitoring CPU usage per computing resource, ratios between systems activity and user activity, and CPU usage from specific job tasks. Also, users may need access to predictive cloud analytics that allow them to capture trending data on memory utilization and file system growth, so that they can plan needed changes to computing resources before they encounter service availability issues. Not having these capabilities in place may prevent users from taking actions for optimizing cloud resources in use to meet changes in business demand.
Organizations deploying cloud computing services via third-party providers may need technology tools in place to monitor the third-party providers. As a part of their agreements with providers of public cloud services, organizations may request guarantees for levels of performance that service providers are expected to deliver. However, in order to ensure that these service levels are met, organizations may need to have independent monitoring tools in place that allow them to monitor not just actual levels of performance as experienced by business users, but also enable them to conduct root cause analysis of problems as they occur.